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The Arcane - Blog Posts
Wrote this in the comments about Meljay being a straight ship yet feeling as queer as Jayvik and it was I think I cooked with this fr
"Viktor is too busy turning shimmer into wine and walking on polluted water for heteronormativity."
...
hehehehehehehehehehe
I have no idea how to explain but Melvik as a ship *feels* just as gay as Jayvik. This might just be me, but Melvik isn't straight, it's just a ship between the sun and the moon that excludes a caveman himbo-hobo.
Meljay is 10x straighter than Melvik, yet both are technically straight.
Also Melvik should be remained to Eclipse because they're absolutely divine and celestial like the sun and the moon.
The thing is, I wish there WAS ace rep in the arcane. That would have been pretty nice. But, like, it is not there. It's like everyone saying falin is fat in dungeon meshi. I have no problem with fat headcanons for falin! But, like, in the canon itself, she's just curvier than marcille in all the scenes she's naked and wears baggy clothes in all the scenes she's not. I would say she has the average female body type, even. Do not put her on your good fat rep list or whatever. People are going to be disappointed if they watch arcane or dungeon meshi for ace or fat rep when they find out that is in fact not an element of the show at all.
One of the most deeply compelling relationships in Arcane is between Silco and Sevika. There is a level of dedication and devotion there that would ordinarily be seen in romantic partners, with her even doing the 'pushing your loved one out of the way and taking a critical injury in their place' thing, but what their relationship is based on isn't mutual affection of any kind (though there may or may not be some there) but ideology. I wonder what that dynamic would translate to in other AUs, like a modern one.
The visuals of Arcane are amazing, but the one personal nitpick I have of them is that they seem to play by the opposite of anime rules. You know how in any screenshot of an anime (not all of them, but a lot of them), you can immediately tell who the main character is because they have the lost interesting (or at least weirdest) character design, like this?
In Arcane, it's the opposite. The most interesting designs are often reserved for characters who never have speaking lines, exist for one scene, or who have a short arc and then end up dying. It's like the further away you get from main character status, the more interesting your character design gets. It's not like the designs of the main characters are BAD, mind you, I think not every character design has to be elaborate to be good and I love several of them, but it's always kind of a pity when an amazing character design appears and you know you're only going to see them for five seconds.
Particularly I'm thinking of the councillors and the chembarons, that guy with the gold jaw, transgender cat lady, fish guy, and probably some others I forgot. I hope in future arcane shows the character designs get weirder, because if they pushed it enough I think we could end up with the wildest cast of characters of all time.
Horrible AU where the transformation after Viktor's death in the commune was forced on him by Singed, and he is now both Rio and the weapon he hoped Hextech would never become. Ambessa uses him to invade Piltover, and he has to fight Jayce, who even as he's defending himself keeps trying to reach him, break him out of the mind control - and meanwhile, Jinx and Vi are doing the same with Vander.
I also wonder if he helped him with certain things that would have been difficult for him as a Yordle. It's not exactly a disability in the traditional sense, but there's got to be a lot of things heimerdinger can't do as a (very!) small person in a world of much larger people, and I think the idea of Viktor, a disabled man himself, helping him out with that kind of thing is... Kind of nice? Like, I imagine he gets a little sick of having to be helped, so getting to do that for someone else makes him feel a little more independent. Viktor, dean's assistant and official getter-of-things-on-high-shelves.
An interesting aspect of Viktor's character I haven't seen anyone talk about is that he was the Dean's assistant for awhile. That's, like, a big job. If you're the assistant of The Man in charge, you're doing a lot; scheduling, mediating, doing the mundane work that's necessary but not something Heimterdinger would do. We see this in the way that Heimerdinger sends Viktor to collect Jayce and all of his illegal science stuff.
A job like that requires a lot. Communication skills, a willngness to do the uncomfortable work (confront people, deal with misshaps, etc so Heimerdinger didn't have to), organizational skills, etc. And a lot of being on the move; running errands, following Heimerdinger around, stuff like that.
I assume people would have known about Viktor because it's likely many of them would have gone through him to communicate with Heimerdinger (and vice versa).
The fact that Viktor is relatively introverted while still doing all of this is so impressive and a testament to both his abilities and the intensity of passion that motivated him.
god i know im just drawing the same scene literally everyone else is in my basic af style but i wanted to put together a print of the boys because i am unwell :') so here's one more meager addition to the pile. godspeed jayvik nation.
I think abt this sandwich so often. They made biting this sandwich look sooo satisfying. And the actual thing itself is like the platonic ideal of a sandwich. I crave it. I want to teleport into the arcane universe just so I can eat this one sandwich
Arcane AU where everything is mostly the same but at some point after the academy and before the events of the show Jayvik got married for the tax benefits and so Viktor could have a last name for practical reasons and basically it's a fake dating AU until someone else points out that neither of them seem even remotely bothered that this will impact their future romantic prospects with anyone outside their marriage
AU where Jayce brings Viktor to the hexcore as in the show, but instead of fusing it with Viktor, the hexcore demands a human sacrifice to bring Viktor back - a life for a life. Not wanting to sacrifice someone else, Jayce offers himself, and so the hexcore fuses Jayce's body with Viktor's to repair his body, creating a person I'm currently calling Vyce.
(Viktor and Jayce can still talk in a mind/dreamscape type of place similar to how vik and sky were doing it in s2, though)
Jinx's hallucinations, or lack of them, are retrospectively a glaring symptom of the problems season two has.
She barely has them, and there's really no reason why that I can think of. Her mental health hasn't gotten any better, and even if it had, these things don't just disappear. And why would you get rid of them? They're a big part of her character. The only thing I can think of that makes sense is the writers just... Forgot. Or someone was laid off who was the real brain behind the operation. Or something that vital to her character was just removed for some incomprehensible reason. And that's what the rest of season two feels like, really. There's so many things that were just forgotten or ignored it doesn't seem like any of the same people were involved at all.
Not to mention Shimmer is clearly addictive. You know what would happen if the supply for a drug like that suddenly and rapidly dwindled?
Addicts would die of withdrawal.
Those who didn't die would have to spend their life savings getting a fix from the few people who might manage to manufacture Shimmer for themselves or have some left over, who I'm gonna call Shimmer Scalpers. People would kill and rob other people who had Shimmer. Conmen would make fake 'shimmer' to sell to desperate people, then leave them to die and run with all the money.
Eventually, one of the chembarons would probably find out a way to mass produce it and then take control of the lanes, and chances are they might even be worse than Silco, because they might not even care about any cause except their own profit. It takes a privileged, immature mindset to think that removing Shimmer will just make all its problems go away.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I don't think you needed to be psychic to guess that destroying ALL the shimmer supply was a bad idea.
In Act Three it took three whole doctors to save Vi's life after she gets slashed by a Noxian blade across the chest. Yet in s1 it took a single drop of shimmer to save Vi from the deep stab in the gut Sevika gave her without any other form of medical intervention.
There's just a really gross sense of irony that Caitlyn and Piltover at large took away Zaun's main source of medical care (as controversial as it may be), and then put it's people through a meat grinder battle while withholding such care.
It doesn't help that the meat grinder battle was useless ploy for Jayce to get close to Viktor and so a lot of people, specifically Zaunites, died for nothing.
Healing magic - the ability to stitch yours or someone else's wounds together with a touch - spreads, ironically, like a disease. Get healed by someone, there's a small chance you'll become a healer yourself. Perhaps this was intended by a higher power to be a nice gesture. Someone helps you, and then gives you the power to pay it forward.
For Singed, this was an exploitable loophole.
OR: Viktor finds another way to live.
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Jayvik nation pls check out my fic 🙏
Viktor has some kind of mind-reading power, right? That's how he knows random stuff, like that Jinx's old name was Powder.
And Jayce was sent back to our main dimension BY Viktor to persuade Viktor not to do any glorious evolution shit because it doesn't work (because it starts an apocalypse for some reason).
So instead of immediately blasting Viktor, why didn't he just... Let Viktor read his mind so he could understand the consequences of his actions? If I'm not mistaken, didn't he end up doing that in the end anyway?
It's not like he doesn't know it's an ability Viktor has. The other Viktor would have told him. So...???
In my years in this fandom I've seen a lot of posts that assume Viktor deeply resented Jayce for the time they've spent on hextech or angrily imply he's 'sick of being jayce's assistant' (that's not his job, they're Partners, people.)
so today I bring you a very relevant reel of Viktor in his natural habitat utterly happy in his zone and proud of the work they do together btw. Actual stars in his eyes, if you even care
The jayvik to meljayvik to melvik pipeline
So here's how Mel can survive. The bomb definitely gonna hit her, right? She basically has a target on her back. But hear me out:
Gold prosthetics.
We've got Finn's jaw thing, which I dunno if it's even a prosthetic but it's a big gold thing integrated with his body, and we've got two councillors with large gold parts of their body: that woman with the giant rings, which I think is just meant to be an accessory based on the ndebele people's neck rings, but the thing is about those rings irl is they may not TECHNICALLY be a prosthetic but they do deform the body of the wearer over time and I imagine they're hard as fuck to remove, so the line between them and the body is thin - and then there's the councillor whose entire body is just gold prosthetics to the point where you can't even tell what race he is under there!
So, yeah, there's precedent for gold prosthetics already, and Mel is absolutely COVERED in gold. It's an incredibly obvious visual motif - and not only is it obvious, but the parts where the gold ends and she starts are actually incredibly unclear already.
Like, what's going on with her shoulders and neck? How are those gold plates staying on there if they're not embedded into her skin? She's literally sleeping and they're still in there. You're telling me this isn't foreshadowing that she's gonna get gold prosthetics later on? Maybe something on her shoulders and back, where the bomb is definitely going to blow her the fuck up?
The arcane is a show absolutely full of prosthetics, to the point where if anyone loses any part of themselves at any point, however small, you can guarantee it'll come back as a prosthetic at some point (even Jayce's mum's fingers are visibly frostbitten in his flashback and in the future she has finger prosthetics!), so if they're injuring this woman who they've also very intentionally SMOTHERED in gold, there's no way she isn't gonna become some sort of gold cyborg.
And who's gonna do it to her? Mr. Glorious Evolution, of course. That or Jayce, but... I dunno, if I was to take bets on who's gonna make her a goldborg I'd go for mr. transhumanism.
If I was viktor I wouldn't even feel bad abt my ambiguously bisexual lab partner sleeping with mel. I would just look at her and be like yeah. I get it. And then mel would look at viktor and be like hmm I wonder if I can get a two for one deal outta this and this how how meljayvik can still win
All I want for arcane s2 is for Mel Jayce and Viktor to be in the same room together and talk
Finally, I watched Arcane, so it's time to draw fanart! I wanted to finish today, but there were too many details... I didn't pay attention to it untill i started drawing it myself😅